Theaster Gates: Collecting | Art21 "Extended Play"

I should've prepared for you guys more.

Things are a little unruly.

--Yeah, right on the...

--In the same line, right here.

I have this keen interest in

not just autonomous, singular objects,

but whole collections of things.

Part of the reason I think I'm attracted
to collections

is because they constitute one person's--

or one institution's--

way of seeing the world.

And it's like this little time capsule

of things that were important to someone.

And so, I spend a lot of time

looking for the personality of people
within their collections.

And then maybe even trying to tease out,
in a collection,

why those things are important.

So the first collection that I received is
Prairie Avenue Bookstore,

which was a architectural history bookstore

in Downtown Chicago.

The second collection I purchased
was Dr. Wax.

It was a record store in Hyde Park,

which is a neighborhood on the South Side.

I don't know how many albums...

Six thousand.

Eight thousand.

A lot of albums.

And the third collection was the University
of Chicago's glass lantern slides.

I'm using the glass slides to
teach art history sometimes.

Sometimes I include them as part of
works of art,

or they become the works of art themselves--

in the case of the Jet magazines.

I've taken an amazing canon of
Johnson Publishing magazines.

This is Jet magazine.

We had about twelve thousand unbound periodicals.

I had been binding them and color coding them
by decade.

It's exciting, this body of work,

because it gets to ask questions about
monochrome painting.

When they're functioning as a monochrome painting,

they're not necessarily functioning
like an archive.

But, in fact, my hope is that

the history and the content that's loaded
inside the books

will be waiting for people to unearth it.

As the magazine, it was making the work of
the present.

It wasn't attempting to make an archive.

But it's so amazing that these bound volumes
constitute the 1990s.

And it's a very particular 1990s
Black-American experience.

And I feel really fortunate to have been able
to bind these things

and then to make them present
in the world again.

Right now, we're working on archiving
this hardware store.

The hardware store was, again,
kind of like Dr. Wax.

This amazing guy, Ken,
had owned it for thirty years

and he was retiring.

We loved his building,

but we loved the stuff.

And so, we bought the entire hardware store.

In changing neighborhoods,

poor neighborhoods,

neighborhoods where a big box like
Home Depot might move in,

what do you do with Ken's legacy?

How do you catalog the everyday,

especially as the phenomena of the everyday
is changing?

And is this another way of
tracking Black space?

Black, not necessarily just about Black people,

but about forgotten people.

It's a space where things have stopped growing.

And then maybe it's also, like, the void.

Like, resources go in,

and you're not sure where they go.

Black space.

Like...

Galactic space.

These are the things that I'm working with.

I'm having a lot of fun looking at these objects

both as sculptural objects

and as objects that have the potential to
create new sculptural works.

It's the thing,

and it's the thing that makes the thing.